Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/

by datanut • 6 years ago

617 560 6 years ago

They last line of the article summarizes it well:

Perl 7 is v5.32 with different settings. Your code should work if it’s not a mess. Expect a user release within a year.

Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl? The only times I see it is for legacy stuff, and then only because the script is too much of a hassle to be rewritten.

jpxw2• 6 years ago

Yep, I know of one company still actively using Perl for a large part of its infrastructure. It has its use cases.

noja• 6 years ago

Booking.com?

paultopia• 6 years ago

are the use cases all really really fancy regexes?

Diederich• 6 years ago

One that is definitely still using Perl in a very big way is https://www.ariba.com/

Ariba isn't a household name, but it has deep and widespread connections to thousands of the largest companies in the world.

noema• 6 years ago

Are they named after a very large tropical rainforest?

nchelluri6• 6 years ago

Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23593835

19963• 6 years ago

I do.

Efficient, cheap and stable. Ported to about everywhere.

smabie2• 6 years ago

What do you mean by cheap? Also, perl is incredibly inefficient: it's even slower than Python.

Also, how is Perl any less stable than other languages? Are you saying the language doesn't change much or that it doesn't crash?

continuational2• 6 years ago

What do you mean by efficient and cheap? It doesn't fare well in https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... at least.

nicoburns• 6 years ago

I believe MoveGB is running a perl backend.

triangleman2• 6 years ago

I'm working through the Llama book, seems like a fun alternative to Python.

politelemon• 6 years ago

Yes... We have some high revenue, important contract type systems written a long time ago and maintained by the same subject matter experts who simply move the codebases (old and new) to newer systems and stacks. As you can tell, the SMEs have no interest in learning other things and so any new initiatives that require them to implement it is subject to their preferences.

hinkley4• 6 years ago

Many places don’t support antifragility. Having an old system that nobody wants to rewrite may not be a reflection on the engineers.

You’re an expert, and a rewrite is going to expose you to a lot of scrutiny. You are going to break things, when maybe you haven’t broken things in a long time and people like it that way.

So when some day arrives where a new fad is hot and it’s hard to impossible to find Perl programmers, the will create a new team to rewrite it badly because now they have no other choice. And of course the new folks are going to screw up, but that’s just expected.

smaili• 6 years ago

IIRC Craigslist was written in Perl but that's the only high traffic site that comes to mind.

1-more• 6 years ago

I know some fantasy sports site was, maybe CBS? I had a UX designer colleague who had worked on that.

ori_b2• 6 years ago

duckduckgo, as far as I recall.

petethered• 6 years ago

Duck Duck Go and Booking.com were/are Perl backends.

chubot• 6 years ago

I think they still write everything in Perl, and they employ Larry Wall (or they did several years ago, last I heard)

Twirrim• 6 years ago

The Amazon retail site is written in perl (at least the presentation layer still is, you can find mason references still in the HTML source if you go looking, don't know how much else behind it is in perl).

https://metacpan.org/pod/Mason (if you're not familiar with Mason)

cutler46• 6 years ago

The fashion retailer Net-A-Porter has been a Perl shop since 2000. Haven't checked if that's still the case. They used to employ quite a few leading lights in the UK Perl community a few years ago.

redis_mlc4• 6 years ago

imdb.com is perl.

Most of the ad network backend sites are perl, including a lot of Yahoo.

freyfogle• 6 years ago

yes, definitely. If you are manipulating text, Perl is great.

benbristow3• 6 years ago

I used to work for a company that used Perl as their primary language.

The codebase was millions of lines long, modules (pm files) with like 1000 methods and 10,000 lines, a total mess and it had 0 unit tests too. Almost beyond salvageable. Left a bit of a sour taste.

They're trying to migrate to AWS but AWS don't even natively support Perl in their libraries. There's a few third party libraries in CPAN but nothing as comprehensive as what's available with official libraries for other languages.

Nothing against the language but I don't know why you wouldn't use literally anything else nowadays. Python or PHP, JavaScript or even Ruby if you're looking for a dynamically typed language. AWS don't even support Perl.

ugexe• 6 years ago

Your opinion on Perl is based on one code base you worked at on one job?

psadri• 6 years ago

Perl used to have one of the most extensive module libraries. One of the things I miss about Perl was it’s more sensible module namespace convention (Eg Net::... for networking related) vs the more hip but confusing and hard to discover naming of node modules.

JJMcJ• 6 years ago

Last Perl shop I worked at was newer than the company you described but well on its way toward being like this.

Since Perl code is often very compact, it probably needs a higher comment to code ratio than most other languages, but you don't see that either.

mirchibajji• 6 years ago

There's a few third party libraries in CPAN but nothing as comprehensive as what's available with official libraries for other languages.

That is true. This alone might be a good reason to look elsewhere for new projects.

However, for existing Perl codebases, PAWS is comprehensive and popular library, and is generated from the official botocore: https://github.com/pplu/aws-sdk-perl

proverbialbunny7• 6 years ago

Keep in mind TDD wasn't really invented yet, so it's understandable.

Also, CPAN had better libraries than pip did all the way up until I last used Perl in 2015. Ofc, it depends on what you're doing. My point is, there was a reason to use Perl once upon a time ago.

The alternatives back then were PHP, C, C++ (the old bad kind), BASIC, assembly, FORTRAN, and others like Smalltalk. Seeing this, it's understandable why Java took the world by storm the same way Perl did.

redis_mlc4• 6 years ago

There's a few third party libraries in CPAN but nothing as comprehensive

There's 194,000 modules, which is probably the most of any language:

https://www.cpan.org/

Nothing against the language but I don't know why you wouldn't use literally anything else nowadays.

Gee, let me see:

- Perl's Mojolicious web framework is probably the most powerful today.

https://mojolicious.org/

- Perl has moderate static typing with use strict;

- Perl allows forward references, unlike Javascript or Python.

The question is why would I use anything but Perl?

Lammy• 6 years ago

Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl?

Anecdote: I found this Perl image-hosting package a couple years ago as a self-hosted alternative to sites like Imgur, and I think it's great: https://framagit.org/fiat-tux/hat-softwares/lutim/tree/maste...

jhowell• 6 years ago

I think the US Courts still use Perl for Pacer (https://www.pacer.gov/psco/cgi-bin/links.pl) and it seems to be used by the US Cours as well: https://ecf.azd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ShowIndex.pl

mfontani5• 6 years ago

Sure: https://www.theregister.com/about/company/website/

ainar-g• 6 years ago

OpenBSD uses Perl actively.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159041121804486&w=2

megaframe• 6 years ago

Yes, I manage a set of tools and libraries written in perl that are pretty large and service the whole company. That said we're re-writing them all to Python so more people can contribute... Saddens me a little I like Perl, but I'll get over it.

ww520• 6 years ago

Yes. You’ll be surprised. Some of the biggest tech companies still use Perl in their critical components in production, and some of the initiatives are in recent years.

austincheney• 6 years ago

The primary use case of Perl is systems automation. Personally I prefer Node.js but most Linux distributions come with a Perl interpreter already installed and not Node. If you are working in an enterprise environment and for security reasons are not allowed to install software, which is common, you can still perform automation with Perl scripts.

lgl2• 6 years ago

Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl?

My personal experience: at one of my previous jobs we've had the need to find a support ticket system (preferably free) that was flexible enough to handle a few hundred email accounts with different signatures, headers, reply templates, queues, filters, and more for each individual account. At the time the "winner" was OTRS [0] [1], a system in Perl that is super flexible and had a free version (more recently renamed to community edition since it detached a bit from their enterprise version).

It served us well enough that I have deployed it again on my current job when a similar but smaller need arose (both jobs in tourism industry). It's a pretty big and complex thing but does it's job well once configured correctly which does take a bit of work.

The only times I see it is for legacy stuff, and then only because the script is too much of a hassle to be rewritten.

That can possibly be the case here since it is "old" (changelog lists the first public beta at 2002) but has had pretty much continuous development until this day. Any company trying to develop something like this these days would probably choose something else but I guess they're a Perl shop now.

[0] https://github.com/OTRS/otrs

[1] https://otrs.com/

roywashere• 6 years ago

I actually worked for OTRS for some years. It is quite a remarkable company as it is creating an open source line of business software with a nice team of people and is making a sustainable business out of it. There are not much other software companies that managed to do this.

Yes, you can call them open core now. But still many companies are using the community edition and are served well by it.

I worked closely with the technical founder and he started the pre-decessor of OTRS in the 90s while working at SUSE, and yeah of course it was in Perl!

I must say that working on the quite significant OTRS code base, with proper code conventions, 'modern' perl5 is not so bad. But when using third party libraries sometimes you'd see arcane language usage and there seems lots of magic involved...

Also, the technical founder started https://zammad.org -- the same idea but started in 2012 or so. So now it's Ruby!

Modern perl5 is ok. But the ecosystem is slowly deteriorating.

papito4• 6 years ago

IMDB was written in Perl, notoriously. Seeing that the layout has not changed in ages, I can only assume it's still Perl.

I'd imagine a bigger rewrite effort would have led to a more slick iteration on the UI, and it seems the legacy HTML templates are still baked in.

yellowapple8• 6 years ago

DuckDuckGo's also written in Perl, and doesn't seem to have any trouble maintaining a reasonably-modern-looking UI.

hpcjoe6• 6 years ago

Hmm ... don't conflate the presentation UI with the underlying language. I wrote my companies website (2 jobs ago) in Mojolicious (perl web framework), with a responsive UI, based in part upon bootstrap. Very modern (for the time) UI. All backed by a very fast implementation.

IMDB seems plenty fast to me. UI isn't great, but that's more of a presentation layer design thing than a language thing.

frakkingcylons• 6 years ago

A lot of Debian's packaging tools are written in Perl.

mmcclimon• 6 years ago

Nearly everything at Fastmail is in Perl. Cyrus, which is the mail storage engine, is in C (and open-source), but everything else is Perl.

lilSebastian2• 6 years ago

Perl is used extensively in the enterprise solutions we deliver for our client.

iso16313• 6 years ago

I wrote a quick perl script earlier today to push crt.sh results for a bunch of domains into slack.

Took about 30 minutes, far less time than messing about with why pip has broken on my desktop yet again:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/pip", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main.py", line 73, in main
    command = create_command(cmd_name, isolated=("--isolated" in cmd_args))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/__init__.py", line 96, in create_command
    module = importlib.import_module(module_path)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/importlib/__init__.py", line 126, in import_module
    return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level)
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 986, in _gcd_import
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 969, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 958, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 673, in _load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>", line 665, in exec_module
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 222, in _call_with_frames_removed
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/search.py", line 18, in <module>

b5n• 6 years ago

I understand no one wants to deal with unexpected issues, especially when you're trying to get something done. Why not use virtual environments? You keep packages out of your system's python, and if you run into issues like above you can just recreate it:

  b5n:~/venv_dir$ python3 -m venv im_a_venv
  b5n:~/venv_dir$ . im_a_venv/bin/activate
  (im_a_venv)b5n:~/venv_dir$ pip install requests
  (im_a_venv)b5n:~/venv_dir$ pip freeze > requirements.txt
  (im_a_venv)b5n:~/venv_dir$ deactivate

  b5n:~/venv_dir$ python3 -m venv another_venv
  b5n:~/venv_dir$ . another_venv/bin/activate
  (another_venv)b@b5n:~/venv_dir$ pip install -r requirements.txt

elwell• 6 years ago

I spent 15 seconds trying to figure out how that 'Perl code' runs...

rabbiveesh• 6 years ago

I write new things in Perl all the time. Deploying highly functional backend services using Mojolicious, a framework which is VERY actively developed.

lmiller1990• 6 years ago

My full-time job is working a codebase where the back-end is entirely written in perl. Codebase was started around 2014. This was probably a bad decision, the founder was a perl guy.

Perl is not bad but no new codebases should ever be written in it imo. It's to easy to shoot yourself in the foot unless you know perl REALLY well. Moose is ok but a far-cry from any modern OOP system.

hpcjoe6• 6 years ago

Lots of new things. Perl is an immensely powerful language. If you know how to write code well, it will be fully comprehensible by even casual programmers.

Many orgs ship perl based tools as current, up-to-date products. Mellanox OFED is one I was using earlier today.

My own github[1] has a plethora of perl projects.

[1] https://github.com/joelandman

totalperspectiv3• 6 years ago

It is alive and kicking in the bioinformatics community!

I still think Perl is a much better tool for what some bash and python scripts are doing. Maybe Perl7 will remove some stigma and allow for people to use the tool instead of it being instantly dismissed.

wheresmycraisin• 6 years ago

Yes. The entire backend to my startup is Perl 5 (Mojolicious) + postgresql (albeit the postgresql part is obviously more important).

HelloNurse• 6 years ago

Last year I had to perform date arithmetic in C shell scripts on a locked down server (no way to install or compile programs and obsolete or missing utilities).

I considered Perl, since it was the only scripting language interpreter, but the good enough (on paper) date handling libraries I found on CPAN turned out to require a far newer Perl 5 version that was available.

I'm afraid that the best-case Perl solution would have been more difficult to write than the roundabout but reliable and easy to understand final solution (Oracle SQL functions executed through the command-line SQL*Plus client).

CJefferson• 6 years ago

Once this is out, I'll be interested in any well written guides or books, it has always felt like "the one that got away" to me.

Back in 2002 I had to choose between learning between Python and Perl for a project, but "everybody knew" Perl 5 was soon going to be replaced by a new shiny different Perl 6, so I chose Python.

It will be interesting to see where Perl can live and gain new users nowadays. Python has so much become the "default scripting language", and has so many bindings and libraries.

nchelluri6• 6 years ago

I think you can learn most/all of Perl 5.32 with http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ , and it appears this is, initially, going to be 5.32 with some saner defaults. So you could really start now, given that.

This beloved guide is now completely updated for Perl 5.22.

I've been working with Perl since about 5.20 and am on 5.31 or 5.32 and haven't noticed many breaking changes FWIW.

chromatic• 6 years ago

The 2016 edition covers most of what's in 5.32; if I were to do an update for Perl 5.32, I'd include postfix dereferencing and the built-in function signature mechanisms now that they're very stable and supported.

mprovost• 6 years ago

The Osborne effect for languages. Now there's no risk in announcing version 7 since effectively everyone who was going to choose Perl already chose Python (or Javascript).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

DonHopkins5• 6 years ago

There's also the Ozzy Osbourne effect for programming languages:

    I've listened to preachers
    I've listened to fools
    I've watched all the dropouts
    Who make their own rules
    One person conditioned to rule and control
    The media sells it and you live the role

    Mental wounds still screaming
    Driving me insane
    I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
    I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

briandfoy2• 6 years ago

I already have Preparing for Perl 7 on LeanPub (https://leanpub.com/preparing_for_perl7)

justin66• 6 years ago

I haven't touched perl in something like 15 years, but I can attest that Brian's (brian's? :) ) writings are useful.

h2odragon• 6 years ago

Great. Perl is not my favorite language, but the things its good at and the body of nifty code out there deserve more recognition than they get. Hopefully this will remove some of the discouragements to curiosity that have kept people from looking harder at perl to see if it fits their problems or their mind better than other tools.

nchelluri6• 6 years ago

PHP went directly from 5 to 7, and isn’t it time to steal something from that community?

anon776• 6 years ago

There was a php6... we just do not talk about it. There is a perl 6 also.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

There was a perl 6, but it is no longer perl, though it's still 6.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

No, there isn't. Perl 6 got renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). There's a weekly blog post should you want to stay up-to-date: https://rakudoweekly.blog

Ovid2• 6 years ago

Just to be clear to everyone: this doesn't break anything. If you continue to use Perl version 5, you're fine. If you want to upgrade your major version of Perl, then of course you need to know what that means.

briandfoy2• 6 years ago

To clarify this: if v5.32 can run your code, you should be safe. There have been various small changes in Perl 5 that might not handle something you wrote in 1995.

richard_todd• 6 years ago

I love perl, so I’ll definitely spend some time tonight trying to find out more about the plans. From just this article, it’s hard to see how this is different than just making ‘use v5.34;’ flip some switches. That’s just business as usual in modern perl, even if it changed more things than normal. Still, if bumping the major version gets people to take another look at it, it will be a good thing. And maybe there are bigger plans post-7.0 and this is just to ease the initial move.

haolez• 6 years ago

They are making some space for (controlled) breaking changes. It also sends a message that Perl has a clear path going forward. I'll consider it for my next projects, especially the automation ones.

bhaavan• 6 years ago

This feels like a last ditch attempt to save a dying language. (https://i.imgflip.com/4676mf.jpg) I wonder what exactly does Perl bring to the table as a language, why would one consider choosing it over other languages.

jrockway2• 6 years ago

People are interested in using it and people are interested in developing it, so it continues to be used and developed.

I got my start with Perl; I wrote a book about it, I spoke at every conference, I did training, I maintained the Emacs mode. I started working at Google and, forced to use static languages, found them to be just as productive as Perl. And, they eliminated a lot of problems with Perl -- libraries were resolved at compile-time, and I just ended up with a binary that could be run anywhere (no @INC madness); types were checked at compile-time, so silly errors that required extensive unit testing in Perl could just be automatically underlined by my editor and fixed before I even saved the file.

Something else that bothered me was how much mindshare the dynamic languages were competing for among themselves. I would prefer to write a Perl program over a Java program any day... but Perl did not seem to be fighting with the Javas and C++s of the world, instead it was always trying to take on Python and Ruby. And Python and Ruby were like that too -- every Ruby programmer was out to kill Perl because they didn't like Matt's Script Archive. (Nobody wrote 1990s Perl in the 2000s, so it was kind of a strawman.) You ended up with a bunch of like-minded people fighting for the small attention share of "we don't really care about runtime performance", and all the factions were just too small to take on the larger issue of entrenched static languages. Java and C++ never felt like they had to take features or ideas for Perl, Python, or Ruby. So it all seemed kind of pointless.

With all that in mind, I do think Perl failed to "win". It is a neat programming language, but probably too complicated for beginners and not productive enough for people that have gotten comfy with C++/Java/Go, which are pretty darn productive these days. Meanwhile, Python found its niche pretty much everywhere -- you can program microcontrollers with it, you can write a video sharing website with it, you can do data science with it -- and it's a great introduction to programming for beginners. And, Javascript kind of came out of nowhere to conclusively "win" the dynamic language war (because a dynamic language needs a runtime, and guess what runtime exists on pretty much every computer and phone around these days?)

TL;DR: I kind of agree that the programming language wars have been fought and lost by Perl. That doesn't stop people from wanting to make it better, or to continue to use what they know. You can make lots of great things with it, so people continue to use and improve it.

cutler46• 6 years ago

Perl lost the war because it didn't turn-up for the battle. In the 2000s it went into a kind of COVID19 self-isolation phase. First there was Parrot - a half-assed attempt to create a CLR for dynamic languages. When that failed the MoarVM adventure began. There were about 3 implemetations of Perl6 in development simultaneously (MoarVM, JVM & Rakudo) as Perl5 hemorrhaged mindshare. All-in-all it took 15 years to produce a 1.0 which was so dog-slow for Perl's common use-case it was unusable ... and still is.

IvyMike• 6 years ago

Regular expressions as a first class language feature.

empath75• 6 years ago

You should see some of the atrocities I had to debug at aol because of regex abuse.

cutler46• 6 years ago

Ruby also has this.

pvaldes• 6 years ago

If it works, it works...

lilSebastian2• 6 years ago

Of you're depending on a meme rather than making a valid point, I wonder what you are bringing to this particular table.

Upvoter33• 6 years ago

There used to be a big Python/Perl debate. I'm not sure I could have predicted how well that would turn out for Python, and how poorly for Perl. Readability and ease of use matters?

QuesnayJr2• 6 years ago

I think it was really Perl 6 that killed it. Perl had a significant lead over Python, and the Perl 6 announcement just sucked the life out of it.

NortySpock• 6 years ago

So it's the Osborne effect? Where you stop using Perl 5 because you're waiting for Perl 6 (announced in 2000, released never? As Raku? As a rolling release? The history appears confusing in Wikipedia.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Scarblac3• 6 years ago

It wasn't the language, it was Numpy. Everything that is built on top of Numpy is what made Python so popular.

And I guess Perl also never had its Django (or Rails).

jlokier4• 6 years ago

Universities switched from teaching Java and Scheme to teaching Python.

Probably because Python resembles pseudo-code.

Anecdotally I've heard from a few people who said Python was the first language where ideas just made sense to them. An "easy to learn" language, in other words.

(I can't relate to that and don't know why Python is thought of that way. As far as I can tell, beneath the syntax (which is prettier than Perl), Python is a messy language with even messier standard library.)

sumanthvepa• 6 years ago

I was part of a team that wrote significant parts of Amazon's payment processing systems in Perl in the late 90s. I really loved the language. It's object system was so flexible and powerful. Once you understood how write idiomatic perl. It was a joy to use. I'm looking forward to trying out Perl 7.

jqcoffey2• 6 years ago

Ok, so I wrote tons of Perl and am to this day a fan, but I don’t think one can call a blessed hash (or scalar for the fancy folks) an object _system_.

It is flexible and fun and I do miss it.

True story: years of passing functions to other functions and map/greps made the switch to FP Scala (another language I fear will die) a lot easier!

cutler46• 6 years ago

I've heard Python's object system isn't that different under the hood.

jlokier4• 6 years ago

I don’t think one can call a blessed hash (or scalar for the fancy folks) an object _system_.

Perl first, then JavaScript.

Did you know JavaScript classes are blessed hashes?

They even take about the same amount of syntax. ("__proto__" vs "blessed", "prototype" vs "bless").

Old JavaScript made the blessing crude and obvious.

Modern JavaScript lets you hide it in a "class" decleration. Which you can also do in Perl if you want (though you'll need to choose a module for this, and people generally prefer a different approach to dressing up objects in Perl.)

There's still a blessed hash under the hood which you can see and kind of have to be aware of... in both languages.

Discombulator• 6 years ago

Very similar story here; I barely write any Perl nowadays but am still very fond of it.

I especially like the sigils - they serve in a way as a primitive type system and actually convey useful information when reading code. I suspect people who complain about them are the same who dislike strong typing.

Interestingly, like you, nowadays I am very fond of Scala.

jes51992• 6 years ago

huh. I spent a couple years writing perl professionally, I guess that was around 2006, and I couldn't agree less. Its object system is so bizarre compared to any other language - it's like it doesn't really have an object system, it has parts of a system that you can try to assemble, but no matter what you do you end up with something weird.

And on top of that, the sigils, refs, and `wantarray` systems means that figuring out what syntax you need to invoke something correctly is confusing mental overhead that you have to keep in mind for every function call

Basically the things I learned in perl were the least transferrable concepts of any programming language I've ever worked with. You learn Haskell, or Forth, or Lisp and you learn insights and patterns that you can use in any language. You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall.

earthboundkid3• 6 years ago

Perl definitely has a lot of non-patterned arcana. For instance,

$| This variable, if nonzero, will flush the output buffer after every write() or print() function. Normally, it is set to 0.

In other languages, you do something like os.stdout.buffered(true) or sys.stdout = io::buffer(sys.stdout) or something like that where you're combining composable pieces: the standard std variable, a standard way of opening files with or without a buffer, etc. Perl instead has an obscure global variable that you have to look up/memorize, and it doesn't even have a sensible name like $STDOUT_BUFFERING, so readers who come across $| in a file have to look it up/recall from rote memorization, or hope it has a good comment above it.

peterwwillis2• 6 years ago

You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall.

Yes, this is why it's nice. You don't have to worship at the foot of an industry which slavishly tries to implement a misunderstanding of a system some dude made up 40 years ago to get around problems in other systems some other dudes made up before that. It's weird on purpose. And it's backwards-compatible-crufty on purpose.

Today I can run Perl code written two decades ago, but with the latest interpreter. I don't think any other interpreted language can do that, can they? (Bourne shell?)

SuspiciousSwan2• 6 years ago

I think you should revisit perl.

My first job writing perl was in 2005 or 2006, and it was not a good language for an eager idiot without guidance. After a couple years, I started getting it, and it became one of my favorite languages.

I think it was my coworker who told me to read https://hop.perl.plover.com/ and it blew my mind and made me start to rethink how I was approaching code. With the languages that I'd been using previously, the game was to fit the problem into what the language wanted you to do. HOP would likely be boring to you now, and wouldn't do much for me, but at the time, it showed me that perl was a language in which the same problem could be solved in multiple different ways, and both be just as right as the other.

Fetishizing that freedom, just like anything else, leads to self indulgent trash. I've seen it in every language, but perl allows for so much freedom it is easy to misuse.

It clicked with me that the best perl code was code that did what I intuitively thought it should do when I used it, and did what I thought it would do when I looked at it. Perl, compared to every other language that I've used, gave me tools to accomplish that.

Perl's object system is Python's, just in its raw parts. I still miss aspects of Moose that are impossible or ugly to use in other languages. Regexps are easy to misuse, but grammars allowed me to cleanly express what something did better than I've been able to in any other language. Mixing in functional ideas, where appropriate, made my code easier to reason about, instead of the debugging hell that I've seen it add to languages like Java. When I learned the concepts from perl, I learned when to use them in other languages.

I don't use perl much anymore, and I don't think I would push it on a team, and I really don't think that it is a good language for beginning programmers, unless there are good mentors around. Most of the beautiful code that I've ever written has been in perl.

staycoolboy6• 6 years ago

Perl was my first encounter with regular expressions. To this day, no language I've used does it better and cleaner. This includes Python, Boost/C++, Java, JavaScript, LISP, Go and Rust.

notyourday5• 6 years ago

And on top of that, the sigils, refs, and `wantarray` systems means that figuring out what syntax you need to invoke something correctly is confusing mental overhead that you have to keep in mind for every function call

That's just badly written libraries that exist in pretty much every ecosystem. By now it seems we have settled that after a couple of args the way to pass multiple arguments is via a hash.

7thaccount6• 6 years ago

The Moose library is a pretty advanced OO library that was inspired by Common Lisp's CLOS & Smalltalk I think. Most Perl developers I know use a large amount of libraries as the language itself is lacking in many areas. A lot of people are fine with that, but I prefer kitchen-sink languages which are fairly opinionated.

rcthompson• 6 years ago

On the subject of transferrable knowledge, Perl was the first language I learned, and I was always a little bit confused about why every language I learned since then didn't have pronouns, until finally magrittr came along in R and made perfect sense to me, since "." in magrittr/dplyr feels a lot like "$_" (or "@_") in Perl.

singingfish8• 6 years ago

Perl’s core object system isn’t really an object system, it’s a toolkit for building object systems. Of course this leads to too many ways to do it, so if starting fresh just use Moo

deckard12• 6 years ago

Its object system is so bizarre compared to any other language - it's like it doesn't really have an object system, it has parts of a system that you can try to assemble, but no matter what you do you end up with something weird.

Have you even seen what Javascript is calling OOP? Or the weirdness around "this" keyword? They finally have a "class" keyword, but it's just syntax sugar on top of the weird prototype hashes they have always used.

Lots of languages have weird OOP systems. C++, in particular, if you really want to dive into that. Maybe Java and Ruby are somewhat sane. But I'd prefer not to use either of those, myself.

sateesh• 6 years ago

I think that criticism that by learning perl one doesn't get any transferable concepts is bit unfair. Though I no longer program in perl, some of the things I learnt using perl has been useful later too. To list here are some of the "concepts" that I learnt using perl: regexes, some aspects of *nix system programming (fork, zombies, signal handling etc.), modular code organisation (writing/using perl modules), code documentation (aka PODs) imbibing importance of documenting the code. True learning some other language (say Java) would make familiar with other concepts (say OOP) but perl has its fair share of concepts that one can pick by programming using it.

ricardobeat6• 6 years ago

This seems to be a common experience - people say it felt powerful and modern in the 90s, because it was. For those who started programming in the 00s and 10s it looks clunky and weird compared to the other options.

cutler46• 6 years ago

That doesn't add up because today's most popular languages - JS, Java, Python, PHP and Ruby - were also released in the 90s.

bitwize2• 6 years ago

Perl pretty much felt clunky and weird as soon as I discovered Scheme in 1996 or so.

papito4• 6 years ago

Perl was a great fun scripting language back in the day of CGI and "webmaster@".

It died a noble, honorable death. RIP.

_sbrk• 6 years ago

It's not even close to dead.

staycoolboy6• 6 years ago

I was on one of several CAD teams at Intel in the 90's and huge parts of pre and post-silicon Itanium simulation flows for timing, layout and verification were written in Perl. (Not even Perl 5.6 so we hit the 2GB file limit often!) ... Not the tools themselves, but the control flows and asset managers. The other processors still used Tcl on HPUX/Solaris/AIX so Perl on Linux was like nice warm sheets by comparison.

zeveb• 6 years ago

The other processors still used Tcl on HPUX/Solaris/AIX so Perl on Linux was like nice warm sheets by comparison.

I would agree, but I don't think you meant it the same way I would: I prefer nice cold sheets when I sleep, and I much prefer Tcl to Perl!

tunesmith• 6 years ago

I also quite enjoyed perl. There are a lot of us that cut their teeth on perl and know it well, even if we are currently working in other languages. We also tend to de-emphasize it on our resumes for obvious reasons. But if I had a contract opportunity to spend months or years on a large perl codebase, refactoring it or porting it to something else, I'd probably snap it up in a heartbeat.

tdhz77• 6 years ago

United States District Court filing system for court cases is written in perl. Horrible language filled with one liners that only makes sense in the mind of the now retired and gone programmers. Sadly, I do not know why we cannot pursue other technologies. Perl is a trap... buyers will be stuck for 30 years. Like a mortgage, but without equity or returns.

snapdangle3• 6 years ago

You might want to go ahead and inform those investors who bought Amazon or Booking.com stock in the early 2000s that their orders of magnitudes of returns were really no such thing.

crazypython• 6 years ago

I hear Perl has weak typing with implicit type conversion. The only other language I know that has a powerful implicit type conversion system is C++. How does implicit type conversion work in Perl?

kbenson10• 6 years ago

Conversion is done based on operator, and Perl has different operators for string and numeric operations. For example, == and eq are different operators, with the former doing numeric equivalence comparison, and the latter doing string equivalence comparison. The implicit conversion done to operands in each case is well defined and obvious.

Edit: Whoops, had operators reversed because I explained them after the fact. Fixed!

daotoad9• 6 years ago

There is also a concept of "context" in Perl.

An operation may be evaluated in list or scalar context. For example, if you evaluate an array in list context, you get the members of the array, however, in scalar context, you get the number of elements in the array.

This idea is generalized to discuss different evaluation contexts for scalars. You might hear people discussing how a value behaves in boolean or string context. It's also common to talk about casting as "-ification", for example casting something to boolean context is "boolification".

By default, undefined values convert to empty string and 0. However, this can be made to generate a warning or even a fatal exception by setting the appropriate pragmas.

redis_mlc4• 6 years ago

Generally in Modern Perl-style programming, strict and warnings are enabled, so implicit type conversion is not used as much these days. Warnings or errors are emitted.

I've found this greatly increases reliability.

An example is that I enabled those on the W3C checkers and a serious latent bug was discovered and fixed, even on code I wasn't familiar with.

r00fus• 6 years ago

tl;dr - Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults.

Perl was great 20 years ago for basic scripts. Where is it still used today who hasn't transitioned to Python/etc?

toast02• 6 years ago

Perl continues to be great for basic scripts. Why change and throw away 20 years of experience?

The only thing I've noticed that's lacking is decent protobuf support.

radiator• 6 years ago

Some people would consider that a good thing.

smueller1234• 6 years ago

I think what you're looking for is this: https://metacpan.org/pod/Google::ProtocolBuffers::Dynamic

cutler46• 6 years ago

Most of Perl's virtues were inherited by Ruby, not Python. Hell, Python doesn't even have a regex operator.

srathi• 6 years ago

Perl readability is rivaled only by c++ template code!

fizixer• 6 years ago

Need a comprehensive, up-to-date, yet brief, status of what happened to Perl 6 and where it stands in today's s/w tech.

Floegipoky• 6 years ago

Perl 6 is basically a totally different language than any other Perl, and it took a very long time to go from announcement (2000) to release (2015). It was renamed to Raku last year.

cutler46• 6 years ago

String parsing - Perl5's forte - is still dog slow with Perl6/Raku and year after year we hear that will change in the future. Don't hold your breath.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Perl 6 had its first release in December 2015. Since then, it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). It has monthly releases and a weekly blog: https://rakudoweekly.blog

It supports an improved regex syntax, grammars, Unicode NFG (Normalization Form Grapheme, think "\r\n" as a single codepoint), a gradual type system, async execution of code, junctions, event driven execution, set operations...

Hope this was short enough.

fmakunbound• 6 years ago

According to the Modern Perl author, Five things Perl (Still) Gets Right:

* Compatibility

* Quality

* Usability

* Scalability

* Availability

https://pragprog.com/titles/swperl/

timwaagh• 6 years ago

Mostly the last one. It's included by default with most linuxes and cygwin. So even if your boss hates you and doesn't let you install anything you can still write scripts.

foobar_3• 6 years ago

This is just bad maintenance. Just pick all the stuff people are complaining about and fix it!

1. Improve threads

2. Improve C API support

3. Give local::lib, cpanm by default ... multiple perl versions by default

4. Give direct support for coroutines / async await

5. Mark experimental features as non-experimental (attributes, signatures)

6. Pick an OO system, package system

7. Make switch cool again

8. Get more core modules or remove some. Give more visibility to cool perl modules. like PDL or something.

9. Improve GUI toolkit, Web Deployment and Web Assembly support

10. Improve look and feel of community sites

Heck break some backwards compatibility with Perl4, get rid of format.

noisy_boy• 6 years ago

One more: add a proper exception handling setup.

foobar_3• 6 years ago

Yeah that too! People keep saying perl is a bad language or something and the other languages can't even get implementing closures right.

I've always liked the references syntax, probably the most complained about feature. Its just pointer thinking. You could probably collapse `$array[$x]->{"foo"}->[0]` to `$array[$x]{"foo"}[0]` and save some keystrokes.

Grinnz2• 6 years ago

This is planned.

jlokier4• 6 years ago

Just a little note, Perl 5 actually has (in my opinion) excellent coroutines in the form of the "Coro" module hierarchy. Good enough to run a web service on.

zem3• 6 years ago

it's likely a lot easier to do all that in the perl7 branch, so that backwards-incompatible changes can be made if needed.

Grinnz2• 6 years ago

It's not my understanding that the "Perl 7" idea suddenly gives license to be backwards incompatible. Instead, features that have been made available and gated in previous releases can be made default in a new major version.

superkuh2• 6 years ago

get rid of format.

You shut your mouth. I can't even count th number of my scripts that'd break. I like format for output.

frjalex• 6 years ago

After a million years, it is finally out!

peterwwillis2• 6 years ago

This is possibly a stupid comment, but I'd love a modern language whose expected lifetime is 100 years. A language whose specification details how it can be run for 100 years on changing hardware + operating systems, and is built with the least amount of, and easiest to perform, maintenance in mind.

Those languages kind of exist, but not expressly written as such. C will outlive us all.

billman• 6 years ago

sub foolOnce() { return raku(); }

sub foolTwice() { return perl5(); }

cutler46• 6 years ago

You left-out unrolling @ :).

OakNinja• 6 years ago

Developers in their forties wrote Perl. Developers in their thirties replaced Perl. Developers in their twenties say “What’s Perl?”

cutler46• 6 years ago

Yes and developers in their 50s retired in their mid-30s after making fortunes writing Perl.

davorg• 6 years ago

I wish :-)

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Developers in their teens say: Wow, Raku! https://raku.org (formerly known as Perl 6)

daotoad9• 6 years ago

I'm in my late 40s and say "Wow, Raku!".

I haven't used it for anything work related yet, but working with it is mind expanding and makes me a better programmer in whatever environment I work in.

The type system, multiple dispatch, literate programming support, and command line scripting features are simply amazing.

totalperspectiv3• 6 years ago

I am not yet 30. My first job was all Perl.

I really hope this bumps Perl back into the niches where it excels. Because there are definitely areas where it is the sharpest and best tool for the job.

elchin• 6 years ago

What project, if you were starting now from the scratch, would you use Perl for?

superkuh2• 6 years ago

Any project that runs on a computer (not a microcontroller) that doesn't need a hardware accelerated multimedia. But even if the later you can always use sdl2.

My last three perl projects (not counting throwaway minor scripts): The control interface of a galvanic vestibular stimulator for VR motion sickness. A GUI for doing the required quirky edits to text files for text to speech smoothness. A comment system for a static website.

jwr3• 6 years ago

Much as people complain about Perl, it is the language which I use when I want to have something which will run 10-20 years from now.

I recently wrote a consistency checker for file archives (so that I know when bitrot sets in) in Perl, precisely because I want it to be usable for a long time (https://github.com/jwr/ccheck).

Very happy to see a path forward for Perl 5.32.

boring_twenties3• 6 years ago

Perl is still unmatched for one-liners, and by extension, one-liners that graduate to short scripts.

cutler46• 6 years ago

Yes, of all the Perl books in my collection Tim Maher's "Minimal Perl" (Manning) is still the one I dip into regularly.

jeffhuys• 6 years ago

I don't understand what you mean exactly – couldn't you use any language, even javascript, exactly the same version as you use right now, in 2100? Why not?

Edit: nice tool, by the way!

jwr3• 6 years ago

Have you tried? :-) Especially in the JavaScript world, things evolve so quickly, that they become obsolete within single years. If you use node and npm, within months.

To put this in contrast, Perl 5.001 was released on March 13, 1995 — that's more than 25 years ago, and code written in it will largely run fine today.

latk2• 6 years ago

Interesting, I've been moving away from Perl and Python and towards Rust precisely because I'm afraid of bitrot. Perl the language is stable as fuck and takes back-compat extremely seriously. The problem for me was the library ecosystem: Cpan makes it tedious to pin/vendor dependencies, and installs dependencies globally by default.

daotoad9• 6 years ago

You might want to look at Carton and cpanfiles as a way of managing dependencies. You can also get really ancient stuff off BackPAN, should your dependencies disappear from CPAN proper.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Carton#Tracking-the-dependencies

http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/

jwr3• 6 years ago

Yes, dependencies are a bit of a problem (I tried to use as few as possible in ccheck), but I'd say that the general culture of CPAN is to keep things long-term and prevent breakage, so my experience has been fairly good over the last 25 years. Something I can't say for node.js.

ksaj3• 6 years ago

Are they still renaming Perl 6? I think it is a tad confusing to have 5 and 7 being so similar, and the 6 in between so radically different. I can't be the only one.

filmor• 6 years ago

Perl 6 was renamed to Raku in October 2019.

ksaj3• 6 years ago

Ah, I am glad the name change happened. I got side tracked before it came to a conclusion. I'm guessing if it didn't happen then, it surely would have to be changed now because of this new version, which looks like far less of a fork in the road.

I know some people aren't fans of Perl5, but it's what I learned and I wasn't all that excited to have to toss everything I knew (and my reference books) just because of a new version number. If Perl6 turns out to be complementary as people were saying/hoping, maybe Perl7 is where we get to see the interplay.

yiyus• 6 years ago

It's explained in the announcement. Perl 6 was already renamed to Raku, but calling the new Perl version Perl 6 would be confusing, so they are directly jumping to 7. They even show other examples of version jumps.

Ovid2• 6 years ago

As a short summary about Perl 7:

If your Perl is old-school, that's OK. Use Perl 5 and we'll keeping supporting you.

If you your Perl isn't old-school, use Perl 7 and get new features.

If you're not sure, ask us and we'll hold your hand to help you understand.

We're here to make sure you're OK.

aduitsis4• 6 years ago

Any chance Cor makes it into Perl 7?

lizmat28• 6 years ago

I understand that to be the plan.

sundarurfriend• 6 years ago

ask us

What's the best way to do that these days? IRC was the most active Perl place back in the day and the best place to get help, where's the best place for people to ask for help these days?

cafard• 6 years ago

I have used Perl since the Perl 4 days.

One can write bad Perl, and I've written a lot.

One can write good Perl, and I've written some. It has saved me and others quite a lot of time on assorted projects.

These days I tend to use Python where once I'd have used Perl. This is mostly because I find that the young are far more likely to know Python than to know Perl. I will be retiring one of these days, after all.

alexpotato• 6 years ago

Feel the same about the above.

I would add that Perl is still the best for one liners since you don't need to "import" key packages to do basic work e.g. you can regexes in a Perl one liner with no imports.

sqrt17• 6 years ago

I'm not anywhere retiring yet, but when Python came around the corner, I thought, well it's as well-suited as Perl for larger things (i.e. not one-liners for text processing - those are a reason for keeping Perl around) but with a cleaner structure.

And that was at a time where you still (occasionally) had to write your own string replacement function that a weirdo company-specific BASIC dialect didn't have.

There's never been a language that I thought of as "Python, but with a cleaner structure", even though Go may be something like "Java 1.2 but with a cleaner structure and a fast toolchain"

hyperbovine• 6 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily generational. Perl and Python differ in a key regard: Perl went all in on TIMTOWTDI, whereas Python went in the complete opposite direction: enforced whitespace, minimal syntax, strong use of conventions and idioms. (When was the last time you heard somebody inquiring about the Perl-ic way to write something?) As a result, a lot of Perl code is an unreadable mess, and many Python programs are intelligible even to non-programmers. It's hard to overstate what a win this is for Python.

swimfar• 6 years ago

TIMTOWTDI="There is more than one way to do it"

senthilnayagam• 6 years ago

Perl 6 with parrot VM was expecting release in 2004, we had some portion of our code in perl. other portions were in php4. chose ruby due to rails announcement in 2004.

will wait for actual release will try on some pet project

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Perl 6 actually got released in December 2015. Meanwhile it got renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). You don't have to wait anymore to be able to use it on a pet, or even a business project. Check out the Rakudo Weekly News if you want to stay up-to-date: https://rakudoweekly.blog

mrits• 6 years ago

I've had to write some Perl in my latest project. Coming back to a language 20 years later at 37 years old was very interesting. I'm not a fan of the language but I can see why people like it.

The largest issue I've had is that even though the ecosystem gives you the ability to write code resembling best practices, I don't see a lot of Perl programmers that do it. Coming onto a project it didn't make sense to catch a whole team up on 20 years of best practices. So I went about writing code that would never be accepted on most of my other teams.

rplnt• 6 years ago

> use utf8;
there’s still much to be done to make Unicode the default

Why's that? If that's something someone with zero Perl experience can easily understand. Isn't this only about the source code? Or does this mean all strings are unicode?

moonchild• 6 years ago

This[1] explains it. Essentially, to support unicode probably, you have to do extra work in your own code. (How do you handle invalid unicode? Should regex character classes match the unicode versions, or just the ascii versions? etc.) Additionally, certain builtin functions don't already support unicode, and modifying them to do that would be a breaking change. For more info, see the py2->py3 unicode change, and how much of a mess that caused.

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484#6163129

ashton314• 6 years ago

My very first program was:

    perl -e 'print int rand(10);'

Good times. Good times. :)

I wrote a lot of Perl. I even wrote a small LISP interpreter entirely in Perl! These days I write more Racket and Elixir, but there's still a soft spot in my heart for Perl. I hope this will breath some fresh life into the language. I think it has a lot of interesting ideas about language design that new languages would do well to copy.

Perl is (in)famous for all the shortcuts possible in the language. While this does steepen the learning curve, I think there are some valuable ideas worth exploring. The implicit topic variable (`$_`) is super nice when throwing together a little script. The semantics are well laid-out in its documentation. I think an improvement would be to somehow make it more clear directly in the language itself where the topic variable is used. Maybe that's what I'll end up looking at in some research. :)

Lots of languages, I feel, optimize for readability for beginners. (I'm thinking about Python and Go here.) Perl is optimized for people familiar with the language. I think that can be a good thing, if done right. What do you guys think?

_____smurf_____• 6 years ago

In some companies, they have huge projects written in Perl

qalmakka• 6 years ago

Perl is the swiss army knife of the shell. Works the same everywhere, it has always been reliable and superuseful for simple to medium scripts. It's the glue that keeps a lot of stuff together, and I'm happy it got back to its tracks after the v6 faux pas.

qbaqbaqba• 6 years ago

Reasonable since "perl6" issue is solved. Everyone may move forward.

markstos• 6 years ago

Perl is alive!

oarla• 6 years ago

I worked on Perl for a while, liked it. Back in 2008/9, the only option for Perl on Windows was Activestate Perl, whose community version was missing lot of features that would have made it much less painful(I am thinking of PPM particularly). That was one of the biggest gripes I had with Perl. We moved everything to Python as soon as we could get comfortable with it and haven't looked back since.

Regarding Perl's one liners, I feel they are what makes Perl very useful, but my preference is AWK over Perl for that.

kbenson10• 6 years ago

I actually found ActiveState and ppm to be fairly useful when I was doing cross system Perl around the same time. You could get the same ActiveState versions for Linux and Windows and have a more consistent environment. In the few cases ppm didn't have what I needed, I would just use a CPAN client. Pretty sure I even got the CPAN client compiling some libs for windows (which took a bit of work, but wasn't impossible).

I even used that setup to package a couple Perl scripts with all their modules into PAR archive executables, circa 2011 I think.

Regarding Perl's one liners, I feel they are what makes Perl very useful, but my preference is AWK over Perl for that.

I love the ability to pull in a CPAN module or two to really kick up a one-liner a notch without making it too long. Also, I like creating an alias to perl that loads up a few useful libs and the main project lib and putting it in the project path so I can use a one liner like a REPL and run small queries, reports, or even do complex DB queries/updates with it using DBIx::Class and all the helper methods I've created for this project's schema.

polynomial2• 6 years ago

Amazing. I literally first installed this on my laptop over 10 years ago. (Using Parrot)

lizmat28• 6 years ago

If it was using Parrot, you probably installed Perl 6 (at the time, now known as Raku).

polynomial2• 6 years ago

Ah you're right, it was 6. Amazing to see Perl still going after all this time!

iso16313• 6 years ago

Wow, I haven't written any perl since

checks

5.27 pm today.

Scarblac3• 6 years ago

Perl has these tiny neat features that I still miss in other languages. Like unless (opposite of if), and postfix syntax.

    print "It worked!\n" unless $error;
    print "Item: $_\n" foreach @items;

singingfish8• 6 years ago

Until some joker writes an unless/else block. Gah. I hope someone implements an elsunless keyword /s

kbenson10• 6 years ago

I've never been a fan of unless blocks (as opposed to the unless postfix, which is a bit easier to swallow). The lower precedence spelled out boolean operators (not/and/or) mean you can just use if not instead, which is just as readable in most cases and isn't confusing in the else case.

e.g.

    unless ( $foo ) { }
    if ( not $foo ) { }

yellowapple8• 6 years ago

Ruby has some of these, too, thanks to its Perl heritage.

    puts "It worked!" unless error
    i = 0; puts "Item: #{i+=1}" while i < 5

Unfortunately foreach didn't survive, but thankfully arrays have methods to achieve similar concision:

    items.each {|i| puts "Item: #{i}"}

dyingkneepad• 6 years ago

I hate unless! It always makes me stop and think a few times, causing double or even triple negatives in my brain. What's wrong with something like "print this if not $error"?

Maybe that's because I'm not a native English speaker?

proverbialbunny7• 6 years ago

Well, print this if not $error doesn't work in most modern languages either. It's

    if not error:
        print this

sergeykish7• 6 years ago

I am not native English speaker but I like it in ruby, helps with double not:

    if not not_implemented
    unless not_implemented

proverbialbunny7• 6 years ago

I miss those too and I'm constantly annoyed Python doesn't have more one liner support.

biztos• 6 years ago

I spent much of my career working primarily in Perl. Now I use it when messing around with older codebases, but not for new work. However, I still use it pretty often for one-liners because of these neat features. For instance:

    perl -E 'say for grep {/o/} @ARGV' one two three

adenozine• 6 years ago

What is there to gain in calling it Perl 7? It seems needlessly disruptive, rather than just calling it 5.34 or whatever is next.

tux1968• 6 years ago

It's reclaiming the Perl name since Perl 6 has abandoned its connection to Perl and is claiming to be a completely separate unconnected language.

This is the logical conclusion to this divergence and will mean that going forward people wont think Perl 6 is the newest version of Perl. That problem would still exist if you leave Perl at 5.35 since search engines are still happily returning pages for Perl 6 even though it's no longer a thing.

sergeykish7• 6 years ago

It is to resolve question of Perl 5 continuity. Something that Python 3 has not accomplished.

EricRiese• 6 years ago

You guys are just now getting to Perl 7? I'm already on Perl 11. http://perl11.org/

lizmat28• 6 years ago

The Perl 11 initiative was started by some individuals in the Perl community, but it never gained much traction outside of the group around the ones that started it. It has been dormant for at least 8 years now.

henearkr2• 6 years ago

I had hope there would be a merging (with some compatibility layers and wrapper binaries) allowing to use Raku the same way Perl 5 was used (should not have been _that_ hard, just adding familiar options and special variables)... Now I'm seeing this goes in a total different direction.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Perhaps. Meanwhile, the most recent release of the Inline::Perl5 module of Raku allows one to have code blocks written in Perl inside Raku code, and vice-versa. And of course be able to use any CPAN module from Raku: https://modules.raku.org/dist/Inline::Perl5:cpan:NINE

henearkr2• 6 years ago

Nice! I didn't know. But it still does not bring back the classic usage in Perl 5 style, that made intensive use of runtime options as shorthands for looping on all lines of a file etc.

gkfasdfasdf2• 6 years ago

I still use Perl every now and again for powerful one-liners and I'm really glad it's around. Here is a bash function I use which takes args and merges and deduplicates PATH-like expressions:

  merge-args () 
  { 
    perl -e 'print join ":", grep {!$h{$_}++} split ":", join ":", @ARGV' "$@"
  }

And I use as follows:

  export PATH="$(merge-args "${SCRIPT_DIR}"/clang-tidy-ex /usr/local/opt/llvm/bin "${INSTALL_DIR}"/{,samples/}bin "${PATH}")"

  ASAN_OPTIONS="$(merge-args "${ASAN_OPTIONS}" detect_leaks=1 check_initialization_order=1 detect_stack_use_after_return=1 strict_init_order=1 strict_string_checks=1 detect_odr_violation=0)"

I know there are other ways of doing this in other languages and even in bash itself, but to me this is simple and elegant.

Spivak• 6 years ago

A pure bash alternative for comparison.

    merge-args() {
        local res
        for i; do
            case ":${res}:" in
                *:"$i":*)
                    ;;
                *)
                    res=${res+$res:}$i
            esac
        done
        echo $res
    }

gkfasdfasdf2• 6 years ago

That is pretty neat, I did not know that 'for i' on it's own could iterate the args like that.

newshhh• 6 years ago

People just keep wasting their precious lives on archaic stuff that has no future. Perl is dead. If these smart minds want to contribute to humanity, they should abandon this sunken ship and move to something more meaningful.

yellowapple8• 6 years ago

Perl is dead.

Seems like DuckDuckGo didn't get the memo.

py_or_dy6• 6 years ago

I've been a perl zealot since 2005. I didn't even know "python" existed until around 2008 when I found a script file with a ".py" file ending in a fresh ubuntu install. I started going to perl conferences sometime after 2010 when someone on irc informed be about them. I learned so much in those conferences, mainly about the alternatives to cgi and the modern OOP "framework" named "moose". I thought I was in heaven.

I landed my first devops position around the 2010 era as well and being the only one on the team that really knew how to "program", I spammed out tons of perl scripts and web apps. A few years later one of the newer employees on the customer support team started spouting off about "python" and how it was so easy to learn. He was always blabbing about terms I'd never heard of like "generators", "list comprehensions", "decorators", etc. I looked them up and learned they were just abstract constructs with fancy names that are supported in most any language. So I just figured he was some idiot that didn't really know anything. Otherwise, why would you be blabbing about abstract constructs? He quickly landed a job at google and I left and started freelancing only picking up perl jobs. Because perl was "dying" and this being after 2012, there were several companies with large perl bases that couldn't find local employees so were forced to allow remote workers.

This is where stuff started going wrong. I went through many jobs/gigs my first couple of years. I quickly noticed that companies that had large perl code bases were all founded pre-2005. This meant it was crap perl, in most cases not even using CPAN but having home grown ORM's and web frameworks and a scrict hate of javascript. So it mostly sucked and was slow going. In one case I was literally fired after a couple of months from this one company that specialized in phone billing accounting software (all perl powered) because I was "too slow". The owner told me he should have never hired someone with less than fifteen years experience with perl and bid me farewell. I almost busted out laughing as for the entire two months I was only doing javascript front end work since the other perl guys there hate javascript. Even the owner of the company had no clue how his own software worked. This was a theme that repeated it self else where as well.

Fast forward a few more years and I had landed a good remote job, still in perl but offered more freedom in the dev cycle. I got good with react and vue.js as it greatly speed up the dev time for all the heavy interactive apps I was tasked with. But I continued to struggle against others in the perl community. I can understand how a 50 year old perl dev (the typical age) would hate javascript and instead put as much code in the back end using all kinds of horrid html templates and never ending form post/refresh/repopulate cycles... I can see the "why should I learn javascript if i know perl" ideology, but what blew me away is a constant "why should I learn SQL if I know perl" ideology. Yes I'm serious. In so many other cases devs were fine with just doing "select *" on tons of tables and stuffing all that in a hash/dictionary of column name matching keys. Databases were big, scripts and page load times would grow to minutes or even hours. Sometimes exhausting the machine's ram and crashing everything. Everyone was fine with it, management just acted like it's how things work. Meanwhile as a co-worker, I'm left digging through pages of perl code that could have just been a single SQL query trying to figure out why some numbers are wrong in an invoice report. It was a continual issue.

Another issue is just the bit rot of cpan. The ORM and drivers for both postgresql and sqlite don't even support most of the features added in those systems since 2014. So even though postgresql is the most advanced DB out there, you are stuck with no ability to use any of the fancy native array or json types or even the "natural" join syntax (and many other things), neither good support for foreign keys in sqlite either.

I've thrown my hands up and jumped ship. It's sad too. I liked many in the community and like Larry Wall as well and have had dinner with him on several occasions. But I can't keep my sanity and stay with perl. I can read perl fine, it is not the notorious "write only" language that many troll it to be. But the issue is the community and those using perl daily are fine with being stuck in 1995. Larry Wall stopped adding features to perl in 2002 (?) and moved to perl 6 which.... well how do you even describe that? The point is, perl has been the same since 2002, mean while python has had continual development and features added every year since then. I'm just done.

proverbialbunny7• 6 years ago

I loved Perl back in at the turn of the millennia. My first data science equivalent projects were in Perl.

To this day I can not find anything quicker to prototype in. Python is slow in comparison. Perl is great for quickly hacking something together for R&D purposes. Also, if you need to write something custom, Perl runs so much faster than Python and R.

I, like many people, stopped using Perl beyond a quick script in 2010. Not out of a lack of love. Perl was great. I wonder if your experience comes from being around the laggards, not so much Perl devs itself. When I was working in Perl no one around me was afraid of Javascript. Javascript and Perl are both C based. They aren't that different.

Your story is eye opening. It tells me what it would have been like if I had stuck around. I imagine working with the few who didn't want to learn new skills must have been more painful than you're letting on.

einpoklum• 6 years ago

Do you mean faster to write, or faster to run, or the combination of both?

mmaunder• 6 years ago

I wrote a lot of popular web apps in Perl, some that appeared in NY Times and Time mag. I quit around 2010 and went over to php which is easier. Wrote a great app and built a successful software biz around it. I think 2010 may have been when Perl 6 felt hopeless and there was no clear leadership or direction in the community.

Mod_perl was the sh*t back in the late 90s for super high performance web apps on Apache. Then Perl stalled and everything else didn’t.

Perl could have been where Python is today if they didn’t take 20 years to waffle about a release that was supposed to do everything and ended up doing nothing because everyone left.

hitekker• 6 years ago

A remarkably self-aware comment. Thank you for this.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

You can describe "Perl 6" as the dead name of the Raku Programming Language (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). :-)

Vivtek• 6 years ago

As a 53-year-old Perl developer (my CPAN handle is MICHAEL, I'm that old), I freakin love Vue.

I haven't done paid work with Perl since the 90's. Now I'm glad I haven't. I use it for my private work because it does what I want it to do, but on the few occasions I've coded for pay since leaving the industry, I've used Python.

seesaw• 6 years ago

I did object oriented programming in Perl from 96 to 2010. We used Perl to create scalable and maintainable enterprise applications. Perl was a pleasure to code in. It is unfortunate the whole Perl6 effort ended up killing Perl. Although I have moved on to other languages, I still haven’t found an enjoyable language as Perl.

cutler46• 6 years ago

Python? That doesn't make sense. Anyone who appreciates Perl would surely choose Ruby over Python.

py_or_dy6• 6 years ago

Ruby is just as dead. Only thing it had going for it was Rails.

manaskarekar• 6 years ago

As someone who has worked arguably a lot with Perl, Ruby and Python, I too choose Python.

simias2• 6 years ago

If what you appreciated in Perl was how pragmatic and "batteries included" it was, then Python is pretty clearly the right choice these days. It's got all the packages you want and get stuff done. I don't like Python's syntax, I think it's filled to the brim with false good ideas, but it's so widely supported that there's not much competition these days.

Although I suppose the way things are headed in a few years that might become... JavaScript, of all things. The theory that the world truly ended in 2012 becomes more appealing every day.

jfkebwjsbx• 6 years ago

it is not the notorious "write only" language that many troll it to be

I dispute that.

I have worked with many languages, and Perl has always been one of the hardest to remember due to non-standard symbol abuse and a few strange semantics.

There is a reason it has that reputation.

Even writing it isn’t easy. I can describe the Python syntax after years of not using it. Perl? No way I remember it.

py_or_dy6• 6 years ago

Understood. I stated that to say my problems with perl is not the language itself. To say it is the "community" is not right either. But basically "what is left of the community" is the issue. Languages like python, ruby, perl, etc are only good (if you want to freelance and make money at least) at being a "skin" around a database. That also entails a knowledge of frontend frameworks and workflows as well. Yet the words "database", "javascript", or "webpack" are very rarely mentioned at any of the perl conferences in the last 5 years! In the case of webpack, that's probably never been mentioned.

gbacon6• 6 years ago

I have worked with many languages, and Perl has always been one of the hardest to remember due to non-standard symbol abuse and a few strange semantics.

For example?

theshrike79• 6 years ago

The problem is that it takes a lot of skill to write elegant Perl. The easy way is the one that produces write-only crap.

syx• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing this story, it's really eye-opening

kbenson10• 6 years ago

There are a lot of modules and historical code stuck in old paradigms, but those are useful in their own way for backwards compatibility. There's also newer Perl modules that see heavy use, like Type::Tiny, Mojolicious, etc. We do a lot of internal web-apps with Mojolicious at work, and our larger ones make heavy uses of websockets, async code, and in some cases Vue.js.

The ORM and drivers for both postgresql and sqlite don't even support most of the features added in those systems since 2014.

The popular ORMs for Perl (DBIx::Class, etc) are fairly DB agnostic, so work with Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, etc. You aren't likely to see specific features for one DB in them because of that. What you gain is a consistent and advanced interface for interacting with databases which is mostly the same regardless of the back-end for that project.

There are newer, specialized modules such as Pg or Mojo::Pg to give you specific Postgres capabilities or to enable a more asynchronous model if that's what you're looking for.

Sounds like you had some bad experiences, and that sucks. Nobody will blame you for "jumping ship", but I would suggest you not think of it necessarily like that. You learn and code what you have to for work, and you learn and you code what you feel like or you think gives the most benefit personally. Those naturally change over time for a lot of people, and sometimes they are the same sets of items, and sometimes they aren't. If you ever want to play around with Perl again, even just for fun, it's there for you. It's not going anywhere. Perl doesn't have to be the language you write to make a living, or even the first one you reach for for certain projects, but it might still be a good option for some things, and there's no reason to discount it entirely if you still know how to use it and can find a use case for it.

For example, even if I stop using Perl primarily for development, I'm pretty sure it's going to be the tool I reach for when I need to quickly process some data for the foreseeable future. Just the fact I can pull in anything from CPAN to supplement a one-liner (or a one liner I've copied into a file and formatted to turn into a small script) makes it invaluable over just awk and sed.

deckard12• 6 years ago

perl has been the same since 2002

if you ignore perl 6 then you might as well ignore python 3. And even still, python 2 is dead. There are only a handful of languages as well maintained as Perl 5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_version_history

Perl maintains strict backwards compatibility. I can run code that was written decades ago. I really am curious what features you think Perl 5 lacks.

Another issue is just the bit rot of cpan.

Sure. But NPM exists. There is unmaintained JS code that was created only 6 months ago. Github is littered with orphaned garbage. I could probably find a dozen or so packages within my company's node_modules folder. Perl is less used today so of course the packages are outdated. But in terms of purely giving a crap... no one gives a crap about NPM. No one. It's largely abandonware on the day it's created. I never really found that sentiment to be the case with CPAN. You had to make an effort to get a package out there. The care people put into packages like DBI was incredible, compared to anything I've seen on NPM.

I don't use Perl much these days. But the hate it gets on HN is insane. It's had a lot of what people consider "modern" features as far back as the 1990s. I really haven't seen a single thing Python, Ruby, or PHP have done that much better.

py_or_dy6• 6 years ago

Perl maintains strict backwards compatibility. I can run code that was written decades ago.

I used to spout that off too, but I now think it is just a myth. When the leader/creator of the language abandons it and it sits there stagnate for years, what other "feature" can you advertise? I know, "strict compatibility"! I saw it as a feature as well and even used it as an excuse to not learn python.

But even worse it has tainted an entire generation of small business perl dev shops. They seem to think that they can't move to another language because every couple of years back compatibility in language X breaks and at the same time spout off how their perl CGI scripts from 1998 still work fine ("fine" because it hasn't been hacked yet). Ironically doing this all from their windows laptop that has broken compatibility through many release cycles.

Breaking compatibility and refactoring is a sign of health, not death! But now these old school dev shops have large customer bases on old perl who's customers are not used to paying for any kind "upgrade" (and now they never will be). Contrast that with every now and then on /r/django someone will post a question like "my development firm is wanting to charge me $3k to upgrade from django 1.2 to 2.0 before they will add any new features to my web shop. Is that a good deal?". Its just a fact of life now. Software needs to be upgraded. The only reason that perl apps aren't at the top of all security and sql injection attacks is because there are so few of them (combined with the fact that so much of "perl apps" are custom code from the ground up). Never upgrading your stuff is not a "feature".

It's the same with python 2.7 as well. That is because it is dead, it now has "strict compatibility"!

I really am curious what features you think Perl 5 lacks.

That's a good question. Really, perl can do anything that python can. So what gives? I think the biggest thing that I struggle with just goes back to the "community". I'm trying to stay brief as not to out myself or my last company, but in most cases I was given requirements for a new project and I was off on my own. That's fine. But sometimes I'd be given requirements for a new project and then get micromanaged. As in literally told how to organize the entire project down to little bits like "when a user registers a new account, a function will return a random string 6 characters long and be sent via email to the user and this password will be stored in clear text". That is not the exact case, the real case belongs on codinghorror.com.

But the point I make is given requirements that break normal sane patterns, in python I could go to a mailing list or /r/python and post my issue and expect plenty of answers that I could then show my boss that he is not right. That does not exist in the perl world. I'm sure some perl guys will try to chime in and disagree but it is true. I have asked several question on /r/perl to get advice on really stupid architectural requirements but got 0 responses. The same goes for the perl mailing lists and irc. Its all dead. Many times I've posted to python lists pretending to be making a flask app or something just to get some advice on some webdev best practices, etc, not easy questions but just looking for a discussion. It's embarrassing on the perl side.

simias2• 6 years ago

I haven't seen that much hate for Perl on HN. I personally used it for quite a while and liked it a lot. But I think it's reasonable to consider it a legacy language these days, next to Fortran, Ada and TCL.

Are these languages still used in some niches? Certainly, TCL is still big for scripting ASIC/FPGA design tools last I checked. Similarly Perl projects will still be used and maintained for a long time, it may well outlive us all.

But it's very hard to defend using Perl on a new project these days. I know I wouldn't. I have very little love for Python but I'd go with it instead of Perl almost every single time now. There was a time where CPAN was the killer feature of Perl. Now Python caught up while, as the parent points out, CPAN is slowly rotting due to unmaintained packages. NPM being a mountain of trash is entirely irrelevant frankly. And it's not like in its heydays every single CPAN package was a marvel of software engineering either.

The care people put into packages like DBI was incredible, compared to anything I've seen on NPM.

See, even you use the past tense. There's no argument that DBI is great. That's not the point. Languages survive not because they're good or bad, but because they have community and corporate support. That's why PHP holds up pretty well while Perl slowly falls into irrelevance. We can lament it, we can try to fight it, but can't deny it.

zem3• 6 years ago

I really haven't seen a single thing Python, Ruby, or PHP have done that much better.

explicit function signatures for one!

Lazare3• 6 years ago

I feel you. I'm currently at a startup that, somewhat by accident, ended up writing their backend in PHP.

Modern PHP is actually fine; it's largely avoided the issues perl has; adoption of the latest versions is quite high, and it's...fine. Not the best, not the worst, broadly comparable to other languages, and a far, far, far cry from what most people may think of when they hear "PHP". My last job used Node, the one before that used Python; I have personal preferences, but at the end of the day they're just tools, it's all fine. The "PHP: a fractal of bad design" blog post actually made a big impact on the community, and shocking number of the issues listed there have been solved, with rapid active progress ongoing. (Yes, I know, it still has issues, and people still hate it. No need to comment to let me know.)

And yet...

...there's a big chunk of the PHP community that just really isn't on board with any of this. Every time the core devs release a new language feature, vocal critics complain about how the language is becoming more "enterprisey" or "like Java". Even on the core dev team, when they vote about fixing some crazy broken feature of the language from the bad old days, a vocal minority is always against it. The language (thankfully) has not stayed still since 2002, but people are trying.

And of course, when we advertise to hire devs, if we say we're looking for "PHP devs", we end up flooded with applications from people who basically know how to install and configure plugins for PHP based CMSes, or from "senior devs" who have been hacking together procedural PHP scripts for 20+ years and have zero knowledge of software engineering principles, unit testing, etc. We've ended up hiring python devs to work on a php code base, not because no php devs are out there, but just because the community is so....weird. There are good engineers who happen to sometimes use PHP, but they rarely (if ever) identify as "PHP devs".

I dislike the JS ecosystem and it's constant churn and cult of the new, but sometimes you run across the reverse problem too.

adolfojp• 6 years ago

I heard the "PHP is becoming like Java" argument in 2005 when PHP 5 came out. I'm surprised to hear it's still a thing.

Funny enough I heard the same thing about JavaScript about 5 years ago when ES6 came out.

throwaway777555• 6 years ago

My experience has been the opposite. I work in a PHP shop and with each new version update, a handful of us are excited about the new changes that get made to the language. Our DevOps team has been on top of keeping our servers running the latest production-ready versions of PHP. So many of the refinements are a welcome change. I'm eager for stronger type hinting and other features that are still coming down the pipe.

sergeykish7• 6 years ago

It was self inflicted damage.

PHP 5 felt like two distinct languages - PHP 4 and Java parts. PHP 4 was ok for its tasks, Java parts bolted on top, very unnatural, no continuation. In essence community was subverted. Other prominent examples - pulse audio and systemd. Compare it with Perls "bless" - looks so elegant and natural.

Some people do not buy that change, stick to origins and it makes sense. There was a conference talk "most programmers don't change their habits, wait until they die". It takes many years to burn and bury those who remember. It is said Moses wandered with his people for 40 years (until no those who were slaves left).

If Java was bolted on top of Ruby today I would not stay. At least because Java is better than Java bolted on Ruby.

You have valid point - stuck in the middle there is no way but forward, burn the past. They have point - someone destroyed the language they liked and you is one of them. No one shames bash scripts for lack of engineering principles, unit testing etc. Please do not disrespect them, it is not their fault.

blablabla123• 6 years ago

Yeah a programming language can have such a positive momentum, but the community is also a thing. I think the currently popular programming languages have really healthy communities, go for linting, clean code and modern solutions.

I always avoided PHP but on one job I worked with it after the company was bought. So I had to maintain a billing script written in PHP to be called from the command line. It was running on a huge FreeBSD server that would fail booting oftentimes and in the script you had to change the start and end date each month manually. Of course there was no version control although I was told there was a second copy of that server in case this one failed completely. I wrote the guy (the then CTO) a few times emails with questions but he never responded. Eventually I ported the code to Go with unit tests. I get the point that there is PHP 7 with modern frameworks but those are useless without adopting modern coding and deployment practices.

lmm6• 6 years ago

A few years later one of the newer employees on the customer support team started spouting off about "python" and how it was so easy to learn. He was always blabbing about terms I'd never heard of like "generators", "list comprehensions", "decorators", etc. I looked them up and learned they were just abstract constructs with fancy names that are supported in most any language. So I just figured he was some idiot that didn't really know anything. Otherwise, why would you be blabbing about abstract constructs?
I can understand how a 50 year old perl dev (the typical age) would hate javascript and instead put as much code in the back end using all kinds of horrid html templates and never ending form post/refresh/repopulate cycles... I can see the "why should I learn javascript if i know perl" ideology, but what blew me away is a constant "why should I learn SQL if I know perl" ideology. Yes I'm serious.

You don't see how this is the same thing?

Blackthorn• 6 years ago

Not to speak for the OP, but I'm pretty sure that was the point -- he was making fun of himself, especially when he noted that the guy quickly moved on to Google and he himself later started working in Javascript!

py_or_dy6• 6 years ago

You don't see how this is the same thing?

No.. but feel free to explain.

With my friend that left for google, I was annoyed at him somehow thinking python was advanced just because he was using stuff you could do in any language only he thought more highly of it because of the names. He saw the light of having a clean syntax, I did not, but now I do.

If you look at the history of python, it is an "engineered" language. It was based off of ABC which was a product of a large team of engineers in the early 1980's. Also some of Modula-3 as well. ABC was based off of ALGOL 68 and Pascal. The point is, a lot of money flowed into the design of these languages and python borrowed largely off of that base.

I used to know perl's history quite well, but I'm fuzzy on that now (and stopped caring). I know Larry was quite skilled at whipping up compilers and parsers from scratch, and he was heavily involved in linguistics, but I feel he sort of just did his own thing. The reason to make perl6 in the first place was to make a "proper" language. All of the lexer and parser code in perl5 are purely custom and intertwined. There's no way to change the parser or add an AST without just starting from scratch. That is what perl6 tried to do. But with python, these steps were from the beginning in proper "layers" and that helped the language to evolve with the times better as well as just having a cleaner VM source code which was easier to work on (the trade off being it was slower than perl in many cases).

The end result is python is "syntax with training wheels", you can't deviate too far before it fails to compile. While perl will compile just about anything as long as your semi-colons aren't missing. For me that made python harder to learn. You couldn't just write anything and expect it to work. For me, I looked at the python docs a lot more than perl docs when learning it. There's no reason why you can't do while y = t.pop: ... in python other than it won't let you. That was something that made me put it off for a long time as it felt it was just full of more rules than syntax. I see the light now though. But the point of my rant here is not that python is beautiful code (which I've always found as an annoying "advantage"), but that the perl community it self if just out of touch with what the current market wants (and needs). And that was the point about the 50 year old perl dev I was making. You can certainly code like it is 1995, but it is not what most people want to pay for (and it certainly is not something we need more of).

ikiris• 6 years ago

Try go, you might like it. I did.

throwaway286• 6 years ago

Perl was my first real language, too, but I haven't used it in years. Others complain about the sigils and referencing rules but I learned them early, when I was young, so I guess I didn't know any better.

I even had a job where we created a featureful website with just perl, DBI, and no framework except a simple module written by a programmer who left the company before I was hired. I look back to that job fondly, because everything seemed much simpler. Only bad thing about it was the paycheck. :)

greggman3• 6 years ago

I have disliked perl since I first started using it because it clear it's a hack with hack upon hack of fixes to try to wallpaper over how bad it is.

For example, IIRC it's pretty clear it used to be all variables were global. The solution was a manual command to push a variable onto the stack. That's a horrible solution as it requires perfection everywhere.

Another is all the special meaning but global variables like $_, $. $/ $, $\ $" $; $: $# etc etc.

Any one with any engineering experience learns quick that features like that are an anti-pattern. They're super fragile. Some lines of code down stream are expecting one of those variables to have a certain value. A simple edit somewhere can break it all.

The only languages worse are sh and dos batch files.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

This is one if the reasons that the Perl 6 project started (now known as the Raku Programming Language). Raku only has three of these special (lexical) variables left:

  $_    the topic
  $/    result of the last match
  $!    the last exception caught

An overview: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-perlvar

OldOneEye• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I worked some years with Perl, and while it was fun most of the time, it had a lot of frustrating things that made it difficult to have consistent builds and dependency management. The "There's more than one way to do it" mantra is very damaging when all you want is a productive language to produce something, vs having fun implementing or tinkering with libraries in CPAN. There's a lot of research, including taking a look at the code to really know what the library does, to assemble programs in Perl.

Once you get over the initial conceptual barrier and remember how the sigils are used, and get used to the bless object system, it is fun to develop in it, on an intellectual level. But rather annoying on an "enterprise" level.

In the end, I find it very difficult to justify using Perl over almost any other language. Even PHP would be better for dev teams, due to the higher focus on productivity frameworks, even if the language holds no distinctive advantage over any other. I felt Perl is not really a professional language, but the product of a whimsical creator and community (which, by the way, is very welcoming and open).

tolger3• 6 years ago

This is great news! I was really excited about Perl 6, until I realized it was a different language, and it never quite jelled into a usable thing. So I kept using Perl 5. I write mostly modern Perl code, so this is exactly what I wanted.

I learned Perl back in the late 90's when it was the best way to do web programming. As a C programmer, it was a breath of fresh air. It was a higher-level C for me and I used it for prototyping all kinds of things before writing the production level C code. Nowadays, I still use it for system maintenance and prototyping. It's a great language and very powerful tool.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

No idea when it was the last time you tried jelling. But Raku is very much a usable thing nowadays and is used in production: https://raku.org

tolger3• 6 years ago

That's good to know. I will definitely check it out. Thanks!

Animats• 6 years ago

Thus the embarrassment of Perl 6 is erased from history.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Perl 6 may be erased. But the Raku Programming Language (https://raku.org, using the #rakulang tag on social media) rose from its ashes.

rad_gruchalski• 6 years ago

Perl 5 was great. Written so many things in it. Looking forward to 7. Maybe time to start doing new things in perl?

jVinc• 6 years ago

I'm sorry if this offends. But a complete laypersons* perspective from someone who hasn't been keeping up on the current perl ecosystem is this: perl6 failed to the degree that perl 5 became perl 7, while all the perl programmers switched to ruby or python. Am I wrong?

*ok, not completely layperson, I used perl a lot a decade ago an have spent a week playing with raku at one point, but nothing in my professional life even has a slight smell of perl anymore, which is strange seeing as 90% of our company codebase was perl 15 years ago.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Perl 6 / Raku did achieve its goal of a programming language that kept all the good parts of Perl, and remove it warts, making it ready to become the 100 year programming language.

In my opinion, the failure is in the timing of the process, and keeping the Perl community involved in the process.

eruci• 6 years ago

I write perl professionally as of June 2020 (and I have been writing software in Perl since 1999). Never felt the need to use Python, or any other language for anything I do.

People who use my (mostly) Perl based software on AWS and GCP Marketplaces today are somewhat surprised and/or even taken aback when they find out it is written in Perl. So, I try not to mention that.

rodrigo975• 6 years ago

Finally!

edw• 6 years ago

This article touches on something that I really enjoyed about (the early days) of Perl 5, and I think it may body well for the future of the language.

You could write Perl 5 like it was just a better Perl 4. All of the craziness with modules and references was hidden to you if you wanted to write a Perl 4-esque script that needed to talk to a database or do something else that you could find a module in for in CPAN.

The people would wrote those modules, God help them, I don't know how they managed to write the executable line noise that was in the source, but I didn't care. I could get my job done with a few simple `use` statements.

ojosilva• 6 years ago

The proposed defaults are a good idea, and I hope some or most of 5.32 long standing experimental features become core features (or just go away entirely).

But I'm afraid that the badly needed core C code refactoring and restructuring is being left out, and that will make it very hard to introduce new features into the language.

I also had this secret hope that Perl 7 would be a tidier, simplified Perl 5 with little or no relation to Perl 6. Less confusing syntax would go in sync with the refactoring of the core to create a smaller language that could perform better and be easier for beginners to learn.

redis_mlc4• 6 years ago

I also had this secret hope that Perl 7 would be a tidier, simplified Perl 5 with little or no relation to Perl 6.

That's what the article says.

could perform better

Perl's performance is not an issue.

jasonhansel• 6 years ago

Why does this happen so often to certain language version numbers? ECMAScript 4, PHP 6, and now Perl 6.

peteretep• 6 years ago

Second system syndrome

sergeykish7• 6 years ago

Netscape 5, Windows Longhorn

pflanze• 6 years ago

Maybe someone here is the right person interested in this: I've been working on making Perl more suitable for functional programming[1]. This project still needs a lot of manpower to become something good. I need people to work with me on this, I won't continue alone. Please give me feedback about where I should be going with it, or tell me if you're interested in joining the effort.

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/FunctionalPerl

sabujp• 6 years ago

Perl5 was the first language in which I actually did some substantial projects. It was also heavily used in scientific computing (esp. genetics) until python came along.

p1necone• 6 years ago

I'm trying to work this out but not having much luck - Perl 6 was a "lets make a bunch of breaking changes and modernize Perl a bit", and now that's branched off as a new language called Raku.

Now there's Perl 7, which is sort of the same idea as Perl 6 was, but less radical with the changes? Are the same people working on both? Is Larry involved with both?

triangleman2• 6 years ago

I believe it's not radical at all compared to the Perl 6 idea. It's basically "strict Perl 5" if I'm reading it right.

If Larry had said from the start "Let's make a new language and call it Raku" we would have had Perl 6 long ago, it would have been called Perl Enterprise Edition in the business world, and you'd never have heard of Python or PHP because everyone would be using Perl. Oh well, better late than never.

lizmat28• 6 years ago

Larry has not been involved with Perl 5 for the past 20 years, and not in Perl 6 for the past 3 years or so.

classics2• 6 years ago

Glad to hear it. Perl 6 was some kind of twisted complexity pornography.

rurban2• 6 years ago

To be on topic:

Perl7 is basically the idea to modernize saner settings by default. And breaking backcompat where it hurts. But it's far off a modern perl, like cperl is. They failed to fix the worst historical design mistakes. The hashes, the OO, types, @_, attrs before signatures (which was a major breaking change, but they excused themselves by claiming it was experimental), and many more.

https://github.com/perl11/cperl/issues/414

Instead they are breaking indirect method calls. Thanksfully this will be not POSIX, so nobody will use it.

odc• 6 years ago

This is fantastic news! I'm glad perl 5 is evolving again.

Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

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